Three Comedies Out of Italy: Comedy of Errors,
Taming of the Shrew, and Twelfth Night

SECTION
I

I have already indicated the profound effect Italy's vital, fun-loving
culture
had on De Vere, himself out of place in the dark Calvinist
aristocracy of his day. Here I will discuss three comedies that he
wrote when he returned,
which were directly influenced by his journey. The plots are farces,
good fun, an armature for jokes, asides, cuts, speeches, and musings.
Especially 'Comedy of Errors' was influenced by the frantic confusion
of Commedia Dell'Arte, like a convention of skate-flies.

For
our present purpose, showing how close his plays and life were,
I will concentrate on
building up evidence that no one else could
have written the plays as De Vere did. The early plays usually had
an Anne Cecil. In 'Comedy of Errors' her personality is split into
light (Lucia) and dark (Adriana). His personality also splits into
the separated shipwrecked twin brothers. Interestingly, they were
shipwrecked at eighteen; now seven years later they are twenty-five,
De Vere's age while on tour in Italy. The first brother is always
fighting with his wife. He howls, "Dissembling harlot thou art
false in all, and art confederate with a damned pack to make loathsome
scorn of me." To the light filled female though his twin says,

That Antipholus of Ephesus
likes his wife there is no doubt. He says, "I know a wench of excellent discourse, pretty and witty,
wild and yet too gentle." But still he mistreats her. Luciana
tries to reason with his irrational side by advising, "If you
did wed my sister for her wealth, then for her wealth's sake use
her for more kindness."

As the turmoil proceeds, in the kitchen is fat Nell, as big as all
Europe. Her buttocks are near the Irish bogs, her various other parts
are states of Europe, the nether regions located of course in the
Netherlands. That's how big she is! This was De Vere's burleque on
William Cecil, Lord Burghley's, pedagogical technique of viewing
the map of Europe as a cartographic empress. Since Elizabeth was
noticably thin, De Vere tranformed her into her opposite. Her paramour,
a servant and another split personality, says of her:

And I think if my breast had not been made of faith and my heart
of steel
She had transformed me to a curtal [docked] dog and made me turn
in the wheel

Was this De Vere's admission concerning their affair? She was known
to toy with her men.

Speaking
of geography, the play is set on the Adriatic, specifically near
Ragusa, now
Dobrovnik. Scholars make patronizing allowance for "the
Bard from Stratford", assuming the location was a mythic place
on the Illyrian coast. It wasn't. De Vere mentions the sea route
in this play (Corinth to Epidaurus, the ancient name for Ragusa)
and describes the city-state's striking character ("I will go
lose myself and wander up and down to view the city."). Olivia
in 'Twelfth Night' alludes to the distinctive nearby caves where
pirates camped. She calls Belch an 'ungrateful wretch, fit for the
mountains and the barbarous caves, where manners ne'er were preached." Factual
accuracy was part of De Vere's integrity, his grounding in truth.
He was not a fantasist. Only an observant traveler would have recorded
these specifics. Thanks to Mark Anderson for these geographical insights.

Edward De Vere at age 25
(Courtesy of family of Ruth Loyd Miller)

SECTION
II

'Taming of the Shrew' and 'Twelfth Night' are feature and sequel
starring De Vere's sharp-tongued sister Mary and her insufferable
but brave husband Peregrine Bertie.

Mary was so irrepressible as to be shocking to her social class.
Bertie's family wanted no part of her. Only he did. Bertie knew what
he wanted in a woman and Mary had it–fire. He also knew the secret
to calling her bluff, fight fire with fire.

I am as peremptory as she is proud-minded.
And where two raging fires meet together they consume the thing that
feeds their fury.
Though little fires grow great with little wind, yet extreme gusts
will blow both fires out.

('Taming of the Shrew': II, 1)

In the wedding as Petruchio, (the name an adaptation of Petruchius
who assisted in London theater productions) he grabs the sacramental
wine from the minister and calls a toast. At their real wedding in
1577, for which the play was the entertainment, he ordered 500 gallons
of wine. The swashbuckler, uncaring the consequence, meets his formidable
mate by unexpectedly applying guile:

'For patience she will prove a second Grissel.'

In
no way does Kate resemble Grissel, the medieval paradigm of woman's
patient sufferance. But
she appreciates the power he does not use
and the respect he offers instead. Hence the original title, 'Mind
and Measure". Shown the stick she had prepared for others–by
him subtlely withdrawn–she sees a basis for conjugal harmony.
In fact the Berties were a happy couple all their lives.

De Vere names this shrewish wife Kate after Bertie's mother, Catherine
Somerset, who took no nonsense from her son or anyone else. As an
example of her character, she contrived to have little Elizabeth
De Vere in her home on an occasion she had invited De Vere to visit,
and she put the infant in his lap. Estranged for five years because
he thought the child was not his, he reconciled with Anne Cecil De
Vere and later honored Kate Somerset as Pauline in 'Winter's Tale',
the single wholesomely aggressive female in his dramatic canon.

For our purposes, an interesting
feature of 'Taming of the Shrew' is Kate's father, Baptista Minola.
When De Vere was in Padua, the
setting of the later play, a Baptista Nigrone loaned him 500 crowns
to continue his journey. Another money-lender who helped from London,
through his Venetian representative, was the Marrano Jew Baptista
Spinola. 'Minola' seems to be splitting the difference between 'Nigrone'
and 'Spinola'. In "Two Gentlemen of Verona', there is a Baptiste
Minole.

And in 'Much Ado About Nothing' there is Benedict Spinole. Benedict
Spinola was Baptista Spinola of London's son. This was probably the
first time Jews were portrayed sympathetically in European theater.
They helped him. He must have come to realize honor exists at all
levels and places, not just within the aristocracy. Appreciating
that, De Vere found his way across the class line, a highly unusual
thing for his time and place. Where his imagination could not go
was toward the Lockean premise that the consent of the many permitted
the governance of the few. He never veered from the divine rule of
monarchs as higher links in the holy chain of Being.

There can be no doubt
these plays followed from his southern European trip. Returning
to geography as the common denominator of reality,
he mentions Mantua and Venice at odds if not at war, something not
known anywhere except locally. Correggio's "Io" in Milan
is memorialized at the beginning of the play with the lines, "We'll
show thee Io as she was a maid/And how she was beguiled and surprised/As
lively painted as the deed was done." The painting hadn't ever
been on tour to England. Lombardy is honored as 'the pleasant garden
of Italy' and Padua as 'nursery of the arts'.

De Vere even got a celestial event into the wedding play. The November
1577-January 1578 comet warrants this very specific comment from
Petruchio:

Gentles methink you frown
and wherefore gaze this goodly company
as if they saw some wondrous monument,
some comet or unusual prodigy.

SECTION III

With 'Twelfth Night' De
Vere hit his stride as a lampooner through "art".
In this sequel, about three years after 'Taming of the Shrew', Mary
gets her name back, Maria. Petruchio becomes Sir Toby Belch. Let's
see how this name got invented. Bertie's name has two strong consonants,
B and T. The second, T, is joined to a vowel from his title, Willoughby,
O, plus the last two letters of the title, BY, to get "Toby".
Belch picks up the first strong consonant, B, and adds to it an L
in Willoughby, finished by Bertie's typical table manners, B, L,
plus CH, or Belch. De Vere didn't spend as much wit satirizing his
rival Christopher Hatton, whom Elizabeth called "Sheep".
He simply gave the malevolent courtier the name Malvolio and has
Belch call him the "Sheep-biter" or in other words, nasty
cur. Petruchio's sidekick, Andrew Aguecheek is based on Phillip Sidney,
who had smallpox scars on his face. Elizabeth is in the play as Olivia,
and Maria is her lady in waiting, as Mary was Elizabeth's. De Vere
plays himself as 'the allowed fool', his role at the English court.
He forges a letter supposed to be Malvolio's, signing it "the
Fortunate Unhappy". Hatton (Malvolio) signed his poems Felix
Infortunatus Infoelix, the happy Unfortunate. (Eva Turner Clark,
'Hidden Allusions In Shakespeare's Plays')

The plot depends on another shipwreck with two sets of siblings
who eventually marry their opposite numbers and social order gets
restored–just as in 'The Deceived' by Piccolomini in Siena, where
De Vere arrived as his hero's guest during Twelfth Night festivities,
1576. His first title for 'Twelfth Night' was 'A Pleasant Conceit'
in 1580. This version presumably exists in the papers of Abraham
Fleming, his secretary at that time, but the papers were lost. If
discovered, no more proof would be needed to set the Stratford myth
to rest.

At things stand today, the manuscript would be pleasing but superfluous.
To list the dramatis personae, independently connects the play to
De Vere's life and times and to the previous play about the Berties.

At
the beginning of 'Twelfth Night', Aguecheek says to Maria, "Bless
you fair shrew," indicating that by this time all is well with
the formerly combustible couple. The hapless Malvolio/Hatton gets
more than his share of barbs. He complains that while he is a mere
sheep, "the boar's tusk may both raze and tear". Such was
De Vere's vicious reputation at court, the boar being the major feature
of his Oxford crest. Another pointed scene occurs with Malvolio in
prison, asking for pen and paper to plead his case Campion a French
religious leader in England at that time asked the same, was denied
any means to defend himself, and got tortured to boot. The cruel
inquisition is parodied here as De Vere's "Fool" mocks
Malvolio in his helplessness.

A
startling co-incidence about the location of 'Twelfth Night', Epidaurus
(i.e., this is the Roman name of the town De Vere used in the play,
called Ragusa to the Venetian state, and Dobrovnik in Dalmatia
now) brought out by Mark Anderson's 'Shakespeare By Another Name'
(p. 87) is
that
De
Vere
was not the
first in his
line to visit
the area. His ancestor Robert, 1st Earl of Oxford, shipwrecked
near there with Richard the Lion-Hearted on the way to Palestine.
The King built a church by the sea to give thanks he was saved.

When De Vere returned from Europe and produced these plays, Elizabeth
sponsored him to further work, in particular the Histories during
the build-up for the Spanish War. The early plays mixed farce with
a genius's verbal fluency and understanding. He came to greater self-knowledge
through his art even at this stage, by analyzing his hostility to
married life, through the device of splitting psyches into dark and
light aspects. He also comprehended the spiritual dead end of court
life and would never be the same again:

The common rout against your as yet ungalled estimation
That may with foul intrusion enter in
[can] dwell upon your grave when you are dead
For slanders live upon succession
Forever housed when it gets possession

('Comedy
of Errors': Act III, Scene 1)

In location, characters, plot, names, and style, these plays cannot
be anyone else's but Edward De Vere's after his journey to Italy
and the Mediterranean.